Traditional enemy of free speech. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and circumstances are a product of the author's imagination. Any similarity to people, dead or alive, to events or places, is entirely accidental.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Weekly Gripe

The revolutionary power of the internet will finish off old-fashioned, top down news providers, and replace them with non-hierarchial, modern organisations in which the people themselves get to choose the content and what is important, rather than some out of touch elitist editor.

Sceptical?

I give you 'The Weekly Gripe'. The Weekly Gripe is 'an electronic publication created by private individuals for anyone who has ever felt the need to have a good old gripe about people, things or just society in general. The aim of this site is to provide a platform for discussion and to encourage others to express their feelings. It's good to get that gripe out into the open!'

In other words, the existence of the Weekly Gripe instantly obsoletes the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph. Why bother to pay journalists to write stories for people to grumble about, when they can do it for themselves? Why shell out on highly paid columnists when you can get the same content for free from your readers?

And for anyone wondering what the most popular gripes are, they can be found here. Top ten are:

All of which just goes to show how out of touch politicians are. I can't even remember the last time that Gordon Brown gave a speech on men who leave their shirt unbuttoned or David Cameron attacked the government for their failure to deal with the problem of horse manure in the road.

And my gripe isn't so much against people with loud headphone music - more the people who play music entirely without headphones, as if they were somehow outmoded and the rules of common respect didn't apply to them.

I've often thought that I would seriously considering voting for *anyone* who made it a serious crime to play music loudly on public transport

It already is, Matt. Well not a serious offence but it is a public order offence, if the music is played at a volume that would alarm, inconvenience or distress other passengers. But don't tell Labour; the idiots will probably want to create a specific clause in the CJA 2009 to outlaw such behaviour :(